Earlier this year, I began collecting succulents. A friend gave me some plant cuttings and my mom gave me some pots. While buying a bag of dirt at the nursery, I briefly looked at the bags of top dressing. Top dressing is basically gravel that you pour on top of the dirt after you’ve finished your planting; its function is entirely decorative. I’d already spent twenty dollars on dirt, so I left the top dressing and forgot about it completely.
Planting my little succulent cuttings in their pots was one of the sweetest pleasures I had experienced in recent memory. Somewhere between sinking my fingers into that black dirt and stepping back to admire my handiwork, I became a plant person.
A few days later, while playing with Zeke in the backyard, I found a rock on the ground and gave it to him. Then we found another, and another. I already had a handful of rocks when I thought of top dressing. I began to search the ground more closely, wondering if I could find enough rocks for one of my smaller pots before Zeke lost interest. Quite suddenly, as I reached the back of the yard, the rocks increased. I looked up and saw that tiny smooth pebbles were strewn all along the ground near the fence. Now I wasn’t thinking about which of my pots were going to get the top dressing, I was thinking about how to collect them all.
Even though I’d seen photos of plants with top dressing, I was still caught off-guard by how much they transformed my plants as I added them to the pots. It was an answer to a prayer I hadn’t even thought of praying.
The miracle of God’s love is that not only is it big enough to save a whole world; it’s also small enough to be here on my back porch in a little potted plant.
He tends his flock like a shepherd: He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart; he gently leads those that have young. Isaiah 40:11